Effective communication is essential to enabling successful collaboration. It enables collaborators to build common ground, to foster ideas, to develop the complex interpersonal relationships that facilitate effective interactions, and more. In the modern workplace, successful collaboration translates into improved productivity, creativity, and the overall well-being of workers. An important aspect of effective communication is having ongoing group awareness, which includes knowledge of current projects, the current status of co-workers, and how actions of group members may affect other group members.
Fostering group awareness has become an increasingly difficult challenge in today's modern workplaces. Workers may have flexible schedules (e.g., working outside the typical 9-6 workday, working in different time zones, etc.) or may work from remote locations (e.g., such as distributed work locations, client sites, at home, public places, etc.). Furthermore, workers use increasingly specialized collaboration tools (e.g., video chat, virtual world, social networks, etc.) to communicate with peers. Accordingly, determining group awareness of co-workers is difficult, time consuming, and error prone. Thus, it is highly desirable to provide a system and method for determining a presence state of a person without the aforementioned problems.
In addition, the modern workplace is becoming increasingly more distributed and mobile. In today's organizations, it is not uncommon for employees working on the same team or project to be scattered all over the world, across different time zones and cultures, working irregular or extended work hours. While there are many modern tools for enabling communication across distances (e.g., phone, email, and instant messaging), these tools by themselves lack the ability to assist in initiating contact. That is, these tools still require workers to determine the availability, appropriateness, and utility of a chosen communication channel and when to use it.
Simple impediments such as knowing if a co-worker is available to communicate, where that coworker is located, and what communication channels are available hinder and often prevent communication. Recent research has shown that these deficiencies have dramatic impact on workers' ability to successfully collaborate. A consistent result is that casual, impromptu interactions rarely occur between workers who are not co-located. Since these types of exchanges have been shown to be predominant and important in collaborative creativity and problem solving, this result is of concern.
Current technological support for helping workers to initiate collaboration is significantly lacking. Most existing technology is limited to providing a single channel of presence or state. For instance, many instant messaging (IM) clients provide details about whether or not a worker is active inside the particular communication tool. Other systems, such as FXPAL's MyUnity system, provide multiple levels and sources of awareness information that allow workers to be more informed before initiating communication. However, these systems also lack direct facilities to help workers initiate and foster communication among peers.